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PROFILES

I AM FASHION

Guess who Puff Daddy wants to be?

BY MICHAEL SPECTER

The Air France hostess was pleasant but unwilling to compromise. "This flight closes in three minutes,'' she said. "We don't make exceptions." Chuck Bone, who was sitting in the Concorde's first-class waiting lounge at J.F.K., reached casually for his cell phone. It was 7:12 A.M. on a Monday in July. The Concorde was scheduled to depart for Paris at eight, and its passengers generally consider even the briefest delay intolerable. Bone, who was wearing a blue-and-white tracksuit and had a simple diamond stud in one ear, started talking. "Where are you guys? You need to get him here now. They are closing the flight." He listened for a moment and then turned to the woman in charge of the lounge. "He is in the airport,'' he said. "He'll be at the terminal in five minutes.'' The hostess, who was now flanked by three colleagues, was unmoved. "Seven-fifteen and we close it,'' she said."I am sorry, but Mr. Puff Daddy must come by then, or he will have to take another plane.''

Mr. Puff Daddy, the thirty-two-yearold rap impresario, restaurateur, clothing entrepreneur, bon vivant, actor, and Page Six regular--who is also known as P. Diddy, and whose mother calls him Sean John Combs--was expected in Paris within hours. He needed to be on the 8 A.M. flight: it was the first day of fashion week, and Donatella Versace had invited him to sit in the front row at her couture show. Versace's shows always attract enormous publicity, usually more for the celebrities in the audience than for the models on the runway. The Concorde was Combs's only hope of making it on time. Jeffrey Tweedy, the vice-president of Combs's clothing company, Sean John, was in the

lounge looking jumpy. He poured himself a cup of tea and took some valerian. He stared unhappily at the oversized Panerai Luminor watch on his wrist. 7:13 A.M. Two minutes to go.

A few dozen tastefully dressed men and women with chic handbags and understated accessories began boarding the flight. Still no sign of Combs. For the past three days, he had been in Atlanta, at a music-industry event sponsored by Bad Boy Entertainment, the record company he has run for nearly a decade. There had been a party the final night, and Combs didn't leave until around four in the morning. He was driven directly to his chartered Gulfstream G4 jet. By 6:30 A.M., he was on the ground at Teterboro Airport, in suburban New Jersey, but the morning traffic on the George Washington Bridge had begun to build.

By seven-twenty-five, the passengers in the lounge had checked in and most were already on board. The Air France flight attendants were eager to close the door. One was tapping her foot. Everyone in the Combs entourage--Tweedy; Bone, a friend from high school; Mar Sabado, one of Puffy's assistants; her boyfriend, a designer in dreadlocks named Emmett Harrell--was on his or her cell phone or working his or her Motorola two-way pager. Sabado was on the phone with Combs's twenty-eight-yearold chief aide, Norma Augenblick, who was in Paris, making certain that everything was in place for Combs's arrival at the hotel: champagne in ice buckets; a sufficient supply of Puff Daddy's favorite tequila (1800); plenty of Cuban cigars, either Monte Cristo No. 2 or Cohiba. Then, there were the racks of clothing to unpack and organize. Puff

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HERB RITTS

"Fashion is about leaving on your jacket and tie when other people are too hot to bother," Combs says.

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"Lucky girl--she got one before he was hardwired."

??

Daddy does not travel light, and by the time he reached his hotel suite that evening he expected everything to be in order.

At seven-thirty, a man in a two-piece white terry-cloth outfit appeared at the far end of the terminal. He was wearing white tennis shoes, white socks, a skintight white terry-cloth hat pulled low over his forehead, and a large diamond ring on his right pinkie. He was walking slowly, and talking rapidly into his cell phone. The hostess wheeled around and left when he approached. He looked tired but clearly pleased to see his friends. He embraced the various members of his crew and then shook my hand. "I hope you are ready to seriously hang out in Paris,'' he said. "Because don't come with us if you can't stay out with us. I fully intend to show Paris the respect it deserves. We are going to rock that place to the ground.''

His friends clapped once, the way football players do at the end of a huddle. Then they headed for the plane. It was seven-forty. As Combs turned toward the walkway heading onto the Concorde, a security agent gently put a hand on his shoulder and asked him to step aside; after all, even Al Gore gets searched these days. "Mr. Combs,'' the

guard said. "Would it be possible to get your autograph?" Puff Daddy nodded, pinned his cell phone between his left shoulder and his ear, and, still talking, signed the back of an envelope.

"Thank you, sir,'' the security guard said. "Have a really nice trip.''

Two minutes before takeoff, a stewardess came over and asked, hesitantly, if Combs might be willing to turn off his phone. He apologized, then snapped it shut. Despite his outsized image, Combs is a not a big man, and he often speaks in a whisper. When he addressed the stewardess, she had to lean in toward the seat to hear him. "I forget how fast this plane travels,'' he said. "I was trying to explain it to my son before.'' "Eet eez zee speed of a boullet,'' the woman replied. "It eez exactly like we are shot out of zee gun." By the time she had finished describing the velocity of the plane, its cruising altitude, and what happens when the flight breaks the sound barrier, Combs was asleep.

Within moments of touching down in Paris, Combs and his crew were back on their phones. Puffy, now wide awake, seemed to be having trouble with his, so Tweedy, who was sitting one row behind him, offered some advice:

"You have to dial 001 to call a New York cell phone, even if the person is in France," he explained. Combs whipped around in his seat. "Yo, Jeff, excuse me,'' he said, in a low, steady voice."This is my fourteenth Concorde flight. I'm an international fucking player. I'll tell you how to use a phone.''

Combs had come to Paris for fun, but it was fun with a purpose. He considers himself (as do many others) among the most fashionable people in the world, and the business of fashion has become an increasingly central part of his life. Sean John, the clothing company he started three years ago, has emerged as one of the best-selling--and most highly regarded--men's lines in America. Combs's runway show in New York last fall met with praise from even the most skeptical fashion professionals. "It was better than anything in Europe,'' Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper, the downtown fashion magazine, told me. "It was perfectly presented, perfectly original American fashion." In 2001, Sean John's sales, which were thirty million dollars in 1999, rose to nearly two hundred and fifty million.

This year, along with Ralph Lauren and Marc Jacobs, Combs was nominated by the Council of Fashion Designers of America as the menswear designer of the year. He introduced his line with the type of T-shirts and baggy jeans that characterize hip-hop clothing brands like FUBU and Ecko?, but he quickly graduated to a more sophisticated look, with a modern, slightly off-kilter approach to classic preppy clothes.This month, he will bring out Blue--a more expensive line of denim directed at older customers. Combs and Tweedy also have ambitious plans to enter the lucrative and complicated world of women's wear, and to open two Sean John stores in New York next year. At a time when many designers are struggling just to stay in business, department stores seem eager for anything Sean John can supply."Puffy sells second only to Ralph in many of our stores,'' Kal Ruttenstein, the longtime fashion director of Bloomingdale's, told me. "Some of that is because of his name, of course. But his clothes are actually quite wonderful, and you would be amazed to see how many types of people wear them.''

Combs first appeared at the haute-

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couture shows in Paris five years ago. With his hip-hop credentials and his love of the spotlight, not to mention a past that includes highly public moments of violence, Combs provided exactly what the fashion crowd craves: a frisson of danger without much threat of it. He represented the ultimate expression of nineteen-nineties style: excessive, ironic, and a tiny bit thuggish. He wore fur and leather and draped himself in enough diamonds to rival Princess Caroline of Monaco. Combs made his first visits to the Louvre and to Versailles, which he described to me as "some aweinspiring shit." He was escorted to many of the shows by Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. "Puffy is so wonderfully over the top and flamboyant, and, God, do we need that in our business,'' Wintour told me. "Fashion goes through severely dull periods and we must have relief. Puff provides it.''

Donatella Versace, who knows glitz if she knows anything, was counting on Combs's presence to add some adrenaline to her show. The show was scheduled to begin at eight. At six, Combs was working his way through customs at Charles de Gaulle Airport.The drive into the city would take at least an hour; then he would need to change from his travel clothes into a more fashionable, light-gray, chalkstriped suit, designed by Donatella. He would have to look, in the phrase coined by Andre Harrell, his former boss at Uptown Records, "ghetto fabulous.'' That meant choosing appropriate accessories: a silver tie, smoke-colored sunglasses, diamond-and-platinum earrings, a bracelet or two, a couple of diamond rings the size of cherry tomatoes, and a watch covered with jewels and worth nearly a million dollars.

There is nothing in fashion more deliciously low than a Versace show. The ambience is one of excess, with security guards stationed along the runway and models regularly spilling out of their tops. The show, which was held at the Palais de Chaillot this year, was delayed. Puffy didn't leave his hotel until eightthirty. He was with Kim Porter, the mother of one of his two children. (She has another child, whom Combs supports and treats as his own.) By the time they arrived, the bleachers were filled: the Hilton sisters, Nicky and Paris, were there, along with their parents, Rick and

Kathy. Two of the Miller sisters--Alexandra von Furstenberg and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece (along with her exiled husband, Crown Prince Pavlos)--were also in the audience. (They are daughters of Robert Miller, the dutyfree billionaire.) These young women are among the dwindling number of people on earth with the means and the desire to pay twenty thousand dollars for a dress they might wear once.

Combs and Porter, who was dressed elegantly in black and wore a diamond necklace that, next to Puffy's jewels, seemed almost demure, were seated beside the actress Elizabeth Hurley, whose floor-length green evening gown was covered with paisley swirls and glittering stars and cut in a remarkably low V. Hurley wore a silver pendant and pink mules. The front row was a spectacle of preening, with Hurley, George Michael, Rupert Everett, David Furnish (Elton John's lover), the singer Ashanti, and the downtown celebrity actress Chlo? Sevigny posing constantly for the cameras. The most photographed guest, by far, was Combs. (People, Us Weekly, and about eight European magazines--many of them named Hello! in a variety of languages--ran pictures of him with Porter, Hurley, or Donatella Versace. "Wow, Puff Daddeee,'' the photographers screeched. "Mr. Diddeee, can we see the diamonds?")

The fashion show itself lasted about fifteen minutes. Puffy spent much of that time taking pictures of other celebrities with a tiny camera. As soon as the last girl left the runway, he and his friends, led by three security men, went backstage. Versace was having a party at the Ritz Club later that evening, and Puffy would make an appearance, but he still needed to pay his respects to his host. She was surrounded by her staff, some of whom find Combs an unwelcome addition to their world. ("He is like a mezzo Donatella,'' one of them

said to me. "He's a fashion Mini-Me: half the talent, half the glamour, just as demanding.") Air kisses were exchanged in the dressing area. "It blew me away,'' Puff said to Versace, about the collection, which included a patchwork coat made from more than eighty types of antique fabric; a short jacket with blue crocodile skin; and a silver ballgown of antique brocade with a silver lam? skirt. Versace beamed. She wore her peroxided hair straight and long, her lipstick was brown, and her skin was a peculiar shade of gray. Puffy embraced her, and then looked at his assistant Norma and nodded. It was after ten o'clock and, as he put it a few minutes later, he was ready to "escalate." Norma passed the word to the security detail, and within minutes the entourage was gone.

Combs moves like a candidate for the Presidency. He is always late, he is never alone. (Solitude seems to make him nervous.) Even when he needs to travel a single city block--say, from his Bad Boy offices, in midtown, to the MTV studios, in Times Square-- he is loaded into an S.U.V. and driven. This is not purely vanity; Combs has been particularly conscious of security ever since his best friend, the rap star Christopher Wallace, who was better known as the Notorious B.I.G., was gunned down in 1997 in Los Angeles. Combs was with Wallace the night he died, and among his many tattoos there is one on his right wrist, noting B.I.G.'s date of birth and date of death. (The crime, generally attributed to an East Coast?West Coast hip-hop rivalry that also took the life of Tupac Shakur, has never been solved.)

The group was whisked into an underground passage and out a back door. There were scores of kids waiting in the street, and when they saw Combs they started screaming, "Pouf Daddeee, Pouf Daddeee!" and quickly surrounded him, seeking autographs. Combs signed them. (Every time he left a restaurant, hotel, or club in Paris, he was delayed by honeymooners, tourists, and other people wanting him to sign an autograph or pose with them for pictures. I never saw him refuse.) Combs wanted to go to the hotel for a drink before heading to Nobu for dinner. After dinner, he went to Versace's party, and then

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to another club, where he remained until dawn. Versace had booked Combs and his entourage into the Hyatt Regency Paris-Madeleine, and he had a suite on the seventh floor, with a separate elevator key. It was a nice hotel, well situated in the center of town. But it was an unusual choice. In Paris, the beautiful people stay at the Ritz or the Plaza Ath?n?e. Many in the fashion crowd prefer the intimacy of the Hotel C?stes. Nobody stays at the Hyatt. (The second night he was in Paris, Puffy visited Vin Diesel in his suite at the Plaza Ath?n?e--a duplex decorated in white, with a large terrace off the bedroom--and he quickly saw what he was missing. "Norma, we need to stay here,'' Puffy announced. "Time for a change. Get me a room like this." Norma had anticipated this whim, but the Plaza is always full during fashion week, and there was nothing she could do.)

Not that the Hyatt was a hardship: the suite had a baby-grand piano and a large terrace. There were several garment racks in the living room, with more than a dozen suits, scores of shirts, leather jackets, what appeared to be twenty or so belts, and twice as many ties. There were enough shoes to last a lifetime, and enough sneakers to outfit the Knicks. Some of the clothes had been provided by Versace, but most had been flown over from New York. "Can you possibly wear all this in four days?'' I asked Combs. "All I can do is try,'' he replied, with a wink. Sunglasses had been arranged in three rows on a high table next to a couch in the living room. There were about ten pairs in each row; each pair was in its original case, with the top flipped up. It looked like the optical counter at Bergdorf 's. We walked onto the terrace. Montmartre and at least a dozen church steeples stood out against the pale sky. Despite the hour, it was still light. A thin wafer of a moon hung above the city. Emmett and Bone were sitting with Tweedy, sipping wine, taking in the view.

Combs, who often seems uneasy in a crowd unless he is performing, stood self-consciously on the edge of the terrace. "Before we get on our way, I just want to say one thing," he said. "We are in Paris and we are here to learn from one another. We are going to philosophize and improvise and improve each

other's minds. God gave us the chance to be together in this wonderful place and we are going to profit from it. I want to drink mimosas at the Eiffel Tower at dawn. I want us to have fun. But we have to be together to do it. You will not leave me and I will not leave you, and we will have the total experience." (Combs never seems still. Even when he's sitting alone in a corner, he pays attention to everything going on around him.) Within minutes, we were off to Nobu, where the Hilton girls and many models, designers, fashion editors, and a few hangers-on were having dinner. After several seating configurations proved untenable, Combs got the waiters to join three tables, and then he ordered approximately two of everything on the menu. When the waiter finished reading back the order, Puffy told him to bring champagne, wine, and two bottles of tequila."But it has to be 1800 tequila,'' he said."And bring it to the table. I want to see the labels."

Dinner ended around twelve-thirty. The Versace party was already under way. By the time we arrived at the Ritz Club, a long line had formed, and the bouncers were on edge. Inside, Chlo? Sevigny sat on a bench, posing for photographers, and Liz Hurley was playing blackjack with Versace. Despite their presence, it was an oddly B-list crowd, made up mostly of unknown models, publicists, and Versace's own employees. The Hiltons were there, but they are at every party. At one-thirty, Puffy and his friends packed themselves back into their cars and took off in search of better music and cooler people. They found both. The place, near the Marais, was sweltering and crowded. Waves of hip-hop music rolled across the dance floor. The Nelly song "Hot in Herre" was playing. It was the song of the summer, and, despite the heat, nobody wanted to remain seated. Soon after Combs arrived, the d.j. shouted out the obligatory greeting--"P. Diddy's in the house!"--and then played Puffy's No. 1 song "I Need a Girl (Part 1)."

Most people assume that the song is about Combs's relationship with Jennifer Lopez: "Every time I think about your pretty smile, and how we used to drive the whole city wild, damn I wish you would've had my child, a pretty lit-

tle girl with Diddy's style.'' Few couples since Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor have appeared more often in the gossip columns. While Combs and Lopez were together, it was as if two corporations, AOL and Time Warner, say, had merged; as much as anything else, they were a marketing phenomenon. When I asked whether "I Need a Girl" was, in fact, about Lopez, Combs laughed ruefully, then shook his head. "It's a fucking song, man. Would you ask a writer if his book is real or fiction? It's just a song.''

Gwen Stefani appeared on the edge of the dance floor. In the echo chamber of the fashion world, Stefani is currently among the most adored of celebrities. Puff was thrilled to see her. He grabbed her by the leg and gracefully swung her around so that her head nearly dipped to the floor, then he reached for her foot and slowly caressed it. At that point, he turned to me and started to sort of rap:"I am fashion because I live fashion,'' he said. It was so hot in the club that it was difficult to breathe, but Puffy was still wearing his suit, and not one button was undone. His tie was so tightly knotted it seemed to put a strain on his Adam's apple. A diamond stud was planted in each earlobe. A thick rope of a diamond bracelet--from Jacob, the New York jeweller to the hip-hop ?lite--adorned his wrist. He said, "From my manicure to my pedicure, from my head to my toe, it's the swagger that I show the world, it's my face, baby. It's my walk, my attitude.'' He rubbed the wisps of hair on his chin. "Fashion is about leaving on your jacket and tie when other people are too hot to bother." He was also wearing a yellow diamond ring, which looked like a piece of rock candy."Details, baby. It's all about the details. Look at the arm. The ring. The watch. Look at my canary-yellow diamond. Impeccable. Admit it, I am impeccable." He let out a wolf howl, and dozens of dancers started to cheer. At this point, Norma, who is keenly protective, and who, depending on the hour, is a corporate executive, an accountant, a fixer, a party planner, or a high-end concierge, shouted across the floor to me, "This is all off the record, it's off the record!" Combs waved her away."I don't want this off the record. I've got a lot of shit to say about fashion. It don't really matter what you

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